I have lost my original response and now I am re-visiting writing it after viewing Gumdrop and True Skin. What has become apparant is Robbie’s loneliness and abandonment. He is a reflectively condittioned robot who has a sense of memory and desire. What came across was his ( genderised Robot but we are talking of a machine so my conditioning is labelling him as ‘a ‘him’.That is in my taxonomy and classification conditionning as Gumdrop is female due to ‘her’ skirt, gestures and mannerism).

The cruelty of Robbies makers is to condemn him to become obselete and space junk. Rendered useless by an expired battery life. That we all have to face at unknown points of time; he knew his destiny and could control the quality of his demise to his final wishes and moments.